Originally planned as the follow-up to 2014’s Male Sex Work & Society from Harrington Park Press (left), this academic text book was eventually picked up by UK-based Routledge Press after Bill Cohen, Harrington Park’s founder, passed away.
It was Bill Cohen who first approached me to contribute to this project, and encouraged me along the way as I undertook my first academic text with citations, footnotes, addenda, all under the scrutiny of academic reviews.
The new volume is global in scope, and departs from the first in that it includes the voices of sex workers (“Nothing about us without us…”) Thanks to the editors John Geoffrey Scott and Victor Minichiello in Australia, and Christian Grov in New York.
The chapter considers representation of male sex workers in comic books and graphic novels; conclusion is highlighted below. Although at first it seemed like a narrow scope–there are only a few examples of male sex worker representations in comics–I found that close examination of these examples yielded a nuanced picture of sex work as it has changed over the last 25 years.
The works discussed:
Seven Miles A Second, David Wojnarowicz (author) and James Romberger (artist), 1996
Say Please, Kano Miyamoto (author/artist), 2008
Satisfaction Guaranteed, Patrick Fillion (author/artist), 2010
Payday, Sunny Victor (author/artist), 2013
The Lengths, Howard Hardiman (author/artist), 2013
Room for Love, ILYA (author/artist), 2015
Hard to Swallow, Dave Davenport (author/artist), 2016
Velvet Collar, Bryan Knights (author) and Dave Davenport (artist), 2017
